Fundamental Acts of Ministry

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Religion Outside of Religion,” guest-edited by David Farina Turnbloom, raises the question of whether the daily rituals of our lives might be seen as contributing to our religiosity. This is an excerpt from David Farina Turnbloom’s essay on the eucharist, bringing out the notion of eucharist as gathering the fragments of our lives together, reminding the assembly of our identity as the body of Christ. –– Melinda Quivik

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In addition to its sacrificial nature, the Eucharist is celebrated as an eschatological banquet. The feeding miracles, in particular the accounts of feeding the 4,000 found in Mark and Matthew, were meant to emphasize the eschatological nature of the eucharistic meal, a characteristic not lost upon the author of the Didache 9:4: “as this broken [loaf] was scattered over the hills [as grain], and, having been gathered together, became one; in like fashion, may your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.” As fragments marked by the teeth of the world, the church is gathered together to be restored as a whole loaf. At the table of the Eucharist, the fragmented Church is healed and made whole through union with God. The mass itself is a celebration of our share in Christ’s resurrection. Jesus was truly dead and passively raised. In a similar way, through the celebration of the Eucharist, the Church is made whole again.

The Church is always living in between eucharistic celebrations. It is always on its way to the cross and being laid in the tomb. The Church is called to participate in the Paschal Mystery: not simply a death, but also a resurrection. If the ministerial act of distribution facilitates the Christian individual’s journey toward the cross, then in the gathering, the minister facilitates the individual’s journey from the cross to the tomb. Gathering is caring for those who have sacrificed by bringing them to a place where God heals them. I mentioned earlier that in the act of distribution, the minister acts in the person of Simon of Cyrene. In gathering the fragments from the site of their sacrifice to the banquet where they are made whole, the minister acts in the persons of Nicodemus and Joseph. (John 19:38–42)

To conclude this section, I would like to point out that these two acts of distributing and gathering through which ministers facilitate the church’s consumption are the most fundamental acts of ministry. The job of the Christian minister is two-fold: (1) to help Christians be edible, and (2) to help the eaten fragments become whole again so that they might be eaten. Everything a minister does can be understood in terms of these roles. Even the ritual actions of the ministerial priesthood that are carried out in persona Christi must be contextualized and formed by this twofold facilitation. The manner in which ordained ministers preside at the celebration of the sacraments must be formed by the particularity of the fragments they serve (e.g., liturgical reform must be carried out with this twofold facilitation in mind). To make the ritual actions fundamental (i.e., to seek a universalized ritual formally divorced from its context) is to invert the relationship between loaf and fragment. Suddenly, what we learned about the Church based on the nature of food becomes nullified. The Church no longer exists for the world, but the world for the Church.

The rest of this essay is available in the full digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 36, no.4 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

David Farina Turnbloom is associate professor of theology at the University of Portland and the author of Speaking with Aquinas: A Conversation about Grace, Virtue, and the Eucharist (Liturgical Press, 2017).

David Farina Turnbloom, “An Eaten Church: Celebrating the Eucharist as Fragments of Bread,” Liturgy 36, no. 4 (2021): 60–64.